The Venice Film Festival is here once again. I arrived the way most British journalists do; chugging through the humid, swampy haze on the waterbus to the Lido, after the traditional extended, lugubrious stopover at the Murano glassworks. Our facial expressions, after a two-hour EasyJet flight that includes a failure to win anything on its insidious new inflight scratchcard lottery, generally resemble the haunted fretfulness of Dirk Bogarde as he looms up through the fog in his gondola at the beginning of Death In Venice, after a disagreeable journey.

But it has to be said that, professional cynicism and lassitude to one side, the lineup actually does look pretty mouthwatering this year. Festival director Marco Muller has unveiled a sparkling set of films, with contributions from Takeshi Kitano, Ang Lee, Brian De Palma, Damien Odoul and many, many more. And after being snubbed at Cannes, the Brits have a very good showing in the competition, with four British directors: Joe Wright with Atonement, Kenneth Branagh with Sleuth, Peter Greenaway with Nightwatching, and Ken Loach with It's A Free World. However, these are co-productions: Wright and Branagh with Hollywood, Loach and Greenaway with their accustomed European investors.

My friend and colleague Derek Malcolm often runs a book on festival competitions. Were I in his shoes, I would be unsure where to place the shortest odds, especially now, before the starting gun has been fired.

The four film-makers represent four different generations. Loach is the veteran 60s film and TV director, who has continued working, setbacks notwithstanding, fashion-fluctuations notwithstanding, until the present. Greenaway had his greatest or any rate most popular period in the 1980s, after which he appeared to lose his way - or perhaps it was that the British press and public lost their way in trying to follow him. Branagh was adored as a young lion in the late 80s/early 90s with his dazzling adventures in the theatre, on television and with his screen adaptation of Henry V: a positively Olivier-ish straddling of stage and screen. He has, however, suffered (perhaps unfairly) from an anti-luvvy feeling in the media; his stock is bearish and his Shakespeare movie work has not had the success his admirers hoped for. And Wright, the dashing newcomer, has another literary adaptation - which I have reviewed on this site.

Predictions are meaningless at this stage, though perhaps Loach's Cannes success with The Wind That Shakes The Barley last year might make the Venice jury self-conscious about giving him the Golden Lion.

I haven't seen Nightwatching yet. I have no idea what it's like. But for sheer shake-up value, giving Greenaway the Golden Lion would probably be the most gratifying. Whatever your view of him and his work, it is pretty ridiculous that this important film-maker, lauded in Europe, at his creative prime, does not make mainstream cinema releases in this country. Has the continent been cut off by a fog of complacency? A Golden Lion for Greenaway would at least compel some sort of UK distribution for his latest film and allow British filmgoers to make up their own minds.